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Space odysseys

In the fine wine world, one story has dominated the past half-decade: Asia. Hong Kong’s canny decision in February 2008 to abolish sales tax on wine has quickly made it a global fine wine hub to rival London. Farr Vintners, the UK’s leading trader in fine Bordeaux, has seen sales to Asia rise from 26 per cent in 2006 to 57 per cent in 2010, and it says it now has more customers called Chan than called Smith. Rival broker Bordeaux Index, to take another example, says its sales to Asia have doubled every year for the past five years. The showiest wine auction sales in 2011 will take place in Hong Kong.
Where is all this fine wine going, and in what conditions is it being stored? Ambient temperatures in Hong Kong (an annual mean of 23°C) and Singapore (an annual mean of 27.5°C) are far too high for satisfactory wine storage, even though temperature variability is less than in temperate latitudes. Special storage conditions are essential – yet space, in these dizzying cities of apartment dwellers, is hard to come by. Many of Farr Vintners’ Asian customers, for example, store their wine in the UK and only “ship to drink”.
One solution is communal cellaring: wine vaults with impeccable storage conditions in which collectors can rent zones which they can kit out as they wish. Hong Kong Wine Vault, for example, contains more than 200 individual cellars kept at 13°C; the facility also includes tasting rooms and a shop. Crown Wine Cellars in Hong Kong, a former munitions bunker set in parkland, also includes a clubhouse where members can host guests, and offers 50,000 sq ft of storage, some of it 20m underground.
Another practical solution to the challenge of storage in apartments in tropical or sub-tropical climates is wine cabinets, such as those made by EuroCave: free-standing, temperature-controlled units in which wines are stored on sliding trays. Like a fridge, you can take your “cellar” with you when you move apartments, though they are rarely capacious enough for the serious collector, and wines also need to be removed from their packaging (which in the case of the wooden cases used for fine Bordeaux will detract from any eventual resale value).
Cellars in private homes in Asia are, of course, becoming increasingly common with the interest in fine wine, and these often have a distinctively Asian flavour. Philip Tan of Celsius in Singapore specialises in cellar installation throughout Asia, and has installed temperature-controlled cellaring which extends upwards through several floors, for example: a kind of mini high-rise for wine.
Another distinctively Asian take on cellarage concerns visibility. Many Asian fine wine purchases, most commentators concur, are connected with status, notably the ownership and service of Château Lafite Rothschild, at present the fetish wine among Bordeaux first-growths in China. Little status can be accrued by owning wines of this sort invisibly. Many new purpose-built cellars in Asia, as a consequence, consist of zones of existing living space partitioned using glass, so that the entire cellar is visible: the cellar doubling as a display cabinet. For the sake of the wines, though, any glass-walled cellar needs to be equipped with blinds or shutters when visibility is not required.
The Chinese mainland is where most future growth in Asian wine collecting is expected to occur. According to Fongyee Walker of Beijing-based Dragon Phoenix Fine Wine Consulting, “Beijing and Shanghai are different to Hong Kong and Singapore because there is so much more room and people can and do build cellars. Most people I have talked to about this, though, have just used regular contractors for the work and just built a hole under their house. Not sophisticated, but it’s the way”. There are, in other words, evident business opportunities ahead in bringing not just fine wine but fine cellarage to China’s near-half-million thirsty millionaires.

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/18e851aa-609d-11e0-a182-00144feab49a.html#axzz1J599Dkjv

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